The Space Shuttle: 3. Glass rocket

13 Minutes Presents: The Space Shuttle

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, History

9.5 • 4.7K Ratings

🗓️ 28 July 2025

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Columbia reaches orbit. But astronaut Bob Crippen discovers that the shuttle has been damaged – can he and John Young make it home safely?

Parts of the heatshield to protect the shuttle from searing temperatures on re-entry to Earth have fallen off during the journey into space. This new heatshield has never been tested before in orbit. Could more tiles be missing?

Some scenes in this series use recreated sound effects.

13 Minutes Presents: The Space Shuttle is a BBC Audio Science Unit production for BBC World Service.

Hosted by space scientist Maggie Aderin-Pocock.

Theme music by Hans Zimmer and Christian Lundberg, and produced by Russell Emanuel, for Bleeding Fingers Music.

Archive: Nichelle Nichols NASA advertisement, Nasa Archives, 1977 STS-1 Columbia landing sequence, ABC News, CBS News, 1981 Mission audio and oral histories, Nasa History Office

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Sing Sing and I'm Simon Jack. And Good Bad Billionaire is back. It's the podcast
0:06.2	exploring the lives and livelihoods of some of the world's richest people, but this time there's
0:10.6	a twist. On Good Bad Dead billionaire, we are looking back on the lives of some titans of
0:15.6	US industry. Like the first ever billionaire, John D. Rockefeller. The founder of the Ford
0:20.3	Motor Company, Henry Ford,
0:21.9	and the First Lady of Wall Street, Hetty Green. And Simon and I are asking you if they were good,
0:26.7	bad or just another billionaire. Good bad billionaire. Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:32.5	Episodes of 30 Minutes Presents the Space Shuttle are released weekly, wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
0:39.9	But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the full season right now, first on BBC Sounds.
0:48.0	Some scenes in this series use recreated sound effects. This is Shuttle Control, Houston, at 1 hour 49 minutes' mission elapsed time.
1:06.0	It's less than two hours into the first ever space shuttle mission, STS-1.
1:13.5	Orbiter Columbia has already completed one entire orbit around Earth. It's now high above the
1:20.4	Atlantic Ocean, Arking East. Mission control is out of contact with the shuttle and its crew, John Young and Bob Crippen.
1:30.3	As Colombia orbits the Earth, radio signals can only be picked up when it passes over a ground station.
1:37.3	These are dotted around the world, including one in Spain.
1:42.3	We're a little over three minutes away now from reacquiring Colombia over Madrid.
1:51.0	Astronaut Bob Crippin is working on opening the doors to the Orbiter's payload bay.
1:56.6	It's a massive cargo space that could fit an entire bus, but right now, it's empty.
2:04.0	And the payload bay doors are huge structures.
2:08.2	You know, they're 60 feet long, they're very large.
2:12.1	Neil Hutchinson is the flight director in Mission Control.
2:15.7	And they have something on the inside of them that's absolutely vital to the shuttle being able to stay there.
	...

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